Be sure to check out recent works from Anthropology Faculty at WUSTL! All the titles below are either in the catalog now, or on the way…
Can Islam be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State John Bowen 
The question posed by Bowen (Washington U.) in the title of this book is expanded within as the following: "Can Islam become a workable reality for Muslims who wish to live fulfilling social and religious lives in France?" Investigating this question, Bowen interviewed Islamic scholars, educators, and public figures living in France who he argues are trying to configure a set of teachings, norms, and institutions that will provide a positive answer to that question. He describes the deliberations among this population with regards to education, involvement with interest-bearing loans, proprieties of marriage and divorce, the wearing of religious dress, and other issues, while also addressing the more overarching questions of whether norms should differ by region and change over time and the distance scholars may move from specific scriptural injunctions to general principles that can be inferred from scripture. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Memory in Mind and Culture Pascal Boyer James Wertsch 
This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organised around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasising the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.
Ethnicity, Authority and Power in Central Asia:New Games Great and Small 
By Robert Canfield Presented by Canfield (anthropology, Washington U., US) and Rasuly-Paleczek (social and cultural anthropology, U. of Vienna, Austria), 11 studies explore current trends and issues affecting the people of Greater Central Asia. The papers are organized into sections that focus in turn on aspects of four broad issues: government repression and its consequences, ethnic group perspectives and their political consequences, devices of mutual support, and informal grounds of authority and influence. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State 
Bret Gustafson Anthropologists and other social scientists examine the rapidly changing historical moment in Bolivia signaled by the 2005 election of Evo Morales as the first indigenous national president in the Americas. They focus on the emerging cultural politics of territoriality and indigeneity in relation to state change and globalized struggles over the country's natural resources. Among the topics are the domestication of indigenous autonomies from the Pact of Unity to the New Constitution, hygiene panic and urban space in Santa Cruz, and Guarani autonomies and their Others. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The secret : love, marriage, and HIV Shanti Parikh
Arguing that for many women around the world, their greatest risk of getting HIV is from their husbands, Hirsch (sociomedical sciences, Columbia U.) et al. explore the risk of contracting HIV from a marital partner within the contexts of marital and extramarital sexuality in Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. Providing a comparative perspective, they describe how extramarital sex is officially secret in these societies, but also widespread, and how it is an aspect of gendered social organization. They discuss martial customs, relationships, and experiences in these societies, how marriage has been changing and how this affects ideas about intimacy and gender inequality, and how all of these aspects are implicated in the global HIV epidemic. Topics discussed include extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, social risk, the role of the state, and historical changes. The material presented in the book is a result of a five-year collaborative research project, "Love, Marriage, and HIV: A Multisite Study of Gender and HIV Risk." Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Reproduction, globalization, and the state : new theoretical and ethnographic perspectives Carolyn Sargent
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State conceptualizes and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies provide insight into reproduction and reproductive health broadly conceived to encompass population control, HIV/AIDS, assisted reproductive technologies, paternity tests, sex work, and humanitarian assistance. The contributors address the methodological challenges of research on globalization, including ways of combining fine-grained ethnography with analyses of large-scale political, economic, and ideological forces.
The Origins of Altruism and Cooperation Robert Sussman 
This book is about the evolution and nature of cooperation and altruism in social-living animals, focusing especially on non-human primates and on humans. Although cooperation and altruism are often thought of as ways to attenuate competition and aggression within groups, or are related to the action of Sselfish genes , there is increasing evidence that these behaviors are the result of biological mechanisms that have developed through natural selection in group-living species. This evidence leads to the conclusion that cooperative and altruistic behavior are not just by-products of competition but are rather the glue that underlies the ability for primates and humans to live in groups. The anthropological, primatological, paleontological, behavioral, neurobiological, and psychological evidence provided in this book gives a more optimistic view of human nature than the more popular, conventional view of humans being naturally and basically aggressive and warlike. Although competition and aggression are recognized as an important part of the non-human primate and human behavioral repertoire, the evidence from these fields indicates that cooperation and altruism may represent the more typical, Snormal , and healthy behavioral pattern. The book is intended both for the general reader and also for students at a variety of levels (graduate and undergraduate): it aims to provide a compact, accessible, and up-to-date account of the current scholarly advances and debates in this field of study, and it is designed to be used in teaching and in discussion groups. The book derived from a conference sponsored by N.S.F., the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Washington University Committee for Ethics and Human Values, and the Anthropedia Foundation for the study of well-being.
The Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave, China Erik Trinkaus 
For more than a century, scientists have returned time and again to the issue of modern human emergence-the when and where of the evolutionary process and the human behavioral and biological dynamics involved. The 2003 discovery of a human partial skeleton at Tianyuandong (Tianyuan Cave) excited worldwide interest. The first human skeleton from the region to be directly radiocarbon-dated (to 40,000 years before present), its geological age places it close to the time period during which modern humans became permanently established across the Old World (between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago). Through detailed description and interpretation of the most complete early modern human skeleton from eastern Asia, The Early Modern Human from Tianyan Cave, China , addresses long-term questions about the ancestry of modern humans in eastern Asia and the nature of the changes in human behavior with the emergence of modern human biology. This book is a detailed, paleontological and paleobiological presentation of this skeleton, its context, and its implications. By providing basic information for this important human fossil, offering inferences concerning the population processes involved in modern human emergence in eastern Eurasia, and by raising questions concerning the adaptations of these early modern human hunter-gatherers, The Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave, China will take its place as a core contribution to the study of modern human emergence.
